The Kid Stays in the Picture

Directed by Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein
Written by Brett Morgen, based on the book by Robert Evans
Rated M
Chauvel, Paddington and Valhalla, Gleben

Robert Evans is living proof that running a Hollywood studio requires neither taste nor intelligence. His redeeming feature is that at least he admits it.

He didn't even have real producing experience when Charles Bluhdorn, head of Gulf + Western, plucked him from obscurity to run production at Paramount in 1966. Evans was a pretty boy from New York who'd been attracted by the glamour of Hollywood. Norma Shearer discovered him by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel and suggested him to play her late husband, Irving Thalberg, in Man of a Thousand Faces in 1957 - an ironically accurate title.

He was cast as the matador in The Sun Also Rises that year, over Hemingway's objections. "The kid stays in the picture" is supposed to be what Darryl Zanuck said in his defence.

Evans says this is when he realised he wanted to be the boss, the producer. To do that, his gravelly voice tells us on the soundtrack, you had to own the rights to something, so he bought Roderick Thorp's novel The Detective at proof stage for $US5000 and traded it to producer David Brown for a "three-picture deal and a suite of offices". Peter Bart wrote a glowing profile of him for The New York Times, so Bluhdorn hired Evans to run Paramount's European production slate. When those above him lost their heads, Evans got his shot, as head of production at a studio then at the bottom of its game.

The film is based on Evans's rollicking memoir of his 30-plus years as a player, and it's an entertaining Hollywood cliche: a star is born, then pisses it away with drugs and booze. The most intriguing thing about the film - apart from how Evans rose so high so fast - is the documentary technique, which brilliantly evokes the glamour, pace and excitement of the life by using digital effects on still photographs.

First, the cliche. Evans rose spectacularly, taking Paramount to No. 1 in four years, producing Rosemary's Baby, True Grit, Love Story, The Conformist, Harold and Maude, Serpico, Don't Look Now and then - The Godfather. On the way up, he screwed every starlet he could find and, in a different way, most of the film-makers. One of his first acts at Paramount was to hire Bart, because he could read six books in a weekend. Evans wasn't schooled, but he had smarts, and he respected books.

He and Bart decided to return to basics. "You can have stars up the ass, but if it's not on the page, it's not gonna be on the screen." This quote becomes funnier when you learn he didn't want to make The Godfather, didn't want to hire Francis Coppola, and didn't want Al Pacino to play Michael Corleone - which suggests Evans had trouble seeing "it", whether it was on paper or screen.

Coppola didn't want to do Mario Puzo's book either, but Bart convinced him, which led to explosive clashes between Coppola and Evans. Coppola is alleged to have summed him up as follows: "This guy is an idiot. Ninety per cent of what he says is stupid." (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, chapter 5.) You don't hear this in the movie, of course.

Like many Hollywood memoirs, Evans's book is self-serving and unreliable as history, so it's difficult to base a film on it and call it documentary. The filmmakers solve the problem by making it in a style which suggests fabulous falsehood.

Evans's life is mostly told in stills, rather than interviews, but the filmmakers separate the backgrounds from the people, in a digital form of cut-out animation. This makes the photos two-dimensional, and that allows them to play with the backgrounds, to simulate motion. With layered-in sound, the old monochrome photos become like moving images, but the illusion is still obvious. It feels like a brilliantly constructed puppet show, in which Evans is the star attraction.

He's a classic Hollywoodian - vain, foul-mouthed, paranoid, completely unself-aware but charming as all hell. Like many of his contemporaries, he didn't stay in the picture long once he discovered cocaine.